Saturday, December 15, 2007

Well I tried Yojimbo for a couple days. I kept asking myself, what does it do better than folders in finder? I could really only find one thing, the individual file level encryption. Thats not enough to have a whole proprietary filing system and pay extra with the remote access concerns etc. So out it goes. It did get me thinking about printing my receipts online to PDF and just saving them in the file system.

I haven't given up on 1Password -- with that I can have nice and nasty passwords I dont have to remember or type.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Can you get the iPhone to work like a Blackberry? No, but you can get pretty darn close at least for the key stuff:

1) Sync your calendars. Prior to Leopard GroupCal was a nice option for keeping your exchange cal sync'd to iCal and then to the iPhone. Leopard came out and the GroupCal authors seem uninterested in their customer base. They expect an update around Q1. I hope someone finds a solution that doesn't need GroupCal before then. In the meantime, if you use IMAP to get Exchange mail, double click on mail invites and add them to your iCal calendar directly. Thats close enough for me.

2) Email. Even if your company like mine has opened up IMAP, it probably requires VPN first. Most VPN's ive seen are CISCO based don't support the VPN the iPhone has built in (or if they do it requires your IT shop to change CISCO VPN settings. If your organization is of any real size, forget that.

So you have no VPN and you may or may not have IMAP enabled. Almost all organizations have Outlook Web Access (OWA) enabled. The iPhone understands IMAP and POP, what we need is an OWA<->IMAP translation service.

Enter Synchronica (http://www.synchronica.com/). Their Mobile Gateway product does just this and for the most part works fairly well. Go to their web site and sign up for a 60-day free trial. I asked for pricing after the trial and got no response. Their "resellers" in the US make no mention of this service/capability. So I have no idea how to pay for this for real (and given the timeouts in #2 below, i'd be hesitant until they fixed that)

What you get:

1) Full IMAP like access to your email for reading. You can see all your folders and all your email and get alerts as new mail comes in.2) You can generally file, send and reply to emails although sometimes you get timeout messages where the operation failed. The timeout happens more on the filing/moving of emails than it does on the sending. Be careful on the sending since more than once it sent, I got no error message, but the recipient never received.

For me keeping up on the reading to watch for developing emergencies (or just to keep on top of things while traveling) its valuable.

Now since I tend to talk about security, lets address that here. Their IMAP support supports SSL, so data between your iPhone and the Synchronica gateway is encrypted. OWA is likewise encrypted between your company's Exchange server and the Synchronica gateway. The email passes through their gateway and its possible for them to snoop, save, store etc the data there (naturally they claim they don't and it would be bad for business if they did). Thats a security risk that most IT groups would not allow if they knew about it. So you'll have to figure out for yourself if you tell people how you're reading Exchange email on your iPhone.

(p.s. When you send mail via this setup it ads a little tag line that you cant remove while in the demo stage that indicates your mail flowed by a path like this...)

But, despite my thoughts around security, I dont have a password on my iPhone. That means if I drop it someone else can read my mail until I get to a browser to change my password. The iPhone password options are very limited and have no settings like "enable password if I havent used it in 1 hour" type controls which would be more useful. Also as far as I know the iPhone does not encrypt any data it stores which means a password is just a delay for real hackers.

3) Contacts. AddressX, like GroupCal broke with Leopard and they're not updating it any time soon. I dont send new emails to many people from the phone, mostly replies so this really isnt an issue for me. Those I do send new emails to are in my address book in the mac and sync to the iPhone just fine.

As to the rest of what the blackberry does, I could care less. I love my iPhone, I just need it to be useful for both work and home rather than carry two devices. Yes, I could have just gotten a blackberry, but both blackberry and my company have conspired to lock me out of many features on the device (which would be paid for out of my own pocket) so that was not an option. If its a phone I pay for then I decide what goes on it.

yojimbo/) for keeping notes, pictures etc. The whole topic of a personal storage system for this sort of stuff is interesting. Why not use the file system? One reason is indexing, another is around security since you cant encrypt individual items and there's a lot of overhead in making/using encrypted disk images. I'd be filevault all the way if the whole concept wasnt totally flawed. So Yojimbo is cool, and I can print receipts direct to it, save my notes into it and choose which ones are encrypted or not. It also supports saving usernames/passwords but offers no browser integration. I've been using 1Password for saving my login information and its a great application for that with great browser integration. It has the concept of secure notes but no real import/export capabilities so that piece is sort of useless. I'd love to see an app with the combination of what both of these offer. Time will tell.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Ok, so you've been good and disabled all open ports at home but port 22 (ssh) and you've set it up to only allow access with a certificate (no username/password) and you've renumbered the port to something else like 1234. How do you copy files back and forth between home and work without resorting to the command line and SCP?

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Sitting here shivering in New England it seems obvious that despite some awesome text correcting algorithms that the iPhone designers live and work in a much warmer place. Touch typing characters without any tactile feedback when you're freezing your butt off is not easy. No, I dont have any ideas how to fix it, perhaps make them run hotter like the MacBookPro's so they warm your hand to create less jitter :)